Recently opened Yeah Sushi offers whimsical take on Japanese staple

Yuyuan Jiang worked as a sushi chef for eight years, serving up the Japanese delicacy in Houston, Palm Springs, New Orleans, Miami, New York City, and even a stint in Korea — both North and South.

Now, he's rolling up (that's my attempt at a sushi joke) everything he learned from those experiences into his new restaurant, Yeah Sushi, which opened in late May at The Malls Shopping Center along 23rd Street.

Sandwiched between Westlake Ace Hardware and Radio Shack, the compact eatery at 711 W. 23rd St. offers more than 50 varieties of sushi, plus soups, salads and appetizers such as edamame and fried calamari.

Customers are often “surprised” when they first see their order arrive on the table, Jiang says — and for good reason.

“I haven’t seen anything like this in Lawrence,” he says. “Or the state.”

Each dish involves the kind of colorful, elaborate presentation Jiang picked up during his time on the coasts, with sauces carefully applied to the plate to create whimsical designs (fish are a recurring motif) and glowing LED lights to brighten up the food.

That’s the case with Yeah Sushi’s Sweetheart Roll: each bundle of tuna, shrimp tempura, crab meat and cucumber is wrapped in pink soybean paper and rolled into a heart shape. It’s served with a martini glass filled with pink LED lights, and nothing else.

Jiang says he bought the former Thai House space (its owners were retiring, he says) in the hope that his unusual creations would bring in college students. So far, business has been slow, but Jiang is optimistic that it'll pick up when classes resume in August.

Ian Stepp remembers visiting his aunt’s house as a kid, where he’d play classic games like Duck Hunt and iterations of the Mario Brothers saga on the family’s trusty old Nintendo Entertainment System.
Now pushing 30, Stepp is still a fan of the now-classic video games that in recent years have spawned a thriving culture and industry capitalizing on the nostalgia of grownups who coveted Nintendo game systems as kids in the 1980s and 90s.